


You Bleed Just to Know You're Alive

by BlackBlood1872



Category: King Falls AM (Podcast)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Bullying, Character Study, Gen, Gender Dysphoria, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Menstruation, Panic Attacks, Pre-Canon, Self-Harm, Things Get Better, Trans Male Character, Trans Sammy Stevens, most of this is only mentioned, the violence tag is just for the gory imagery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-01
Updated: 2020-02-01
Packaged: 2021-02-19 15:23:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,714
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22513033
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlackBlood1872/pseuds/BlackBlood1872
Summary: Sammy Stevens, from birth to rebirth.An origin, of sorts.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 40





	You Bleed Just to Know You're Alive

**Author's Note:**

> So I wrote most of this a year or so ago but every time Hell Week rolls around, I remember it and this time I decided I'd actually post it lol XD  
> None of this really comes from a good mental place but things start looking up by the end of the fic. The mature rating comes from all the gory imagery. I'm not sure if it really counts as mature but I figured, just to be safe...  
> Title from Goo Goo Dolls' [Iris](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdYWuo9OFAw)

His mother names him Samantha and it’s fine. He doesn’t have any particular feelings towards it as a child, doesn’t really care how adults address him as long as he can play with his friends. His socio-political knowledge is little and he doesn’t really know or care about gender.

Then he is nine years old and he’s dying, he’s bleeding and it won’t stop and it _hurts_. His mother comforts him and lets him take painkillers for the first time, and she shows him the pads to add to his underwear and how to use them.

He hates it. He hates all of it and it doesn’t get better once the bleeding stops, and especially not when it starts up again. He ruins his clothes because he doesn’t know how not to, doesn’t want to learn. His mother is gentle with him for the first few months, and then gets annoyed when the same mistakes repeat.

“You have to _try_ to figure this out,” she snaps at him. “You’ll be doing this for the next fifty years,” she says, and Sam is struck by the sudden inability to breathe. Fifty _years_? Of pain and bleeding and physical changes that he wishes would just _stop_?

He can’t. He can’t do that.

His mother coaches him through his panic attack—but it’s the first of many, and like with his stained clothes, she grows tired of it quickly.

“Theatrics aren’t going to change this,” she tells him, and he wants to scream at her but that isn’t going to fix this either. Nothing is going to fix this.

* * *

When he’s twelve, his teachers finally call his parents about his _development_ , and his mother picks him up from school that same day. She takes him shopping for a bra.

He refuses to talk to her, refuses to look at the things, and spends the whole time staring fiercely at the boys section of the mall. He sees plenty of shirts that he likes, but his mother grabs his arm in a bruising grip every time he tries to wander away. Eventually, she just holds onto him, and uses that grip to shove the garments in his face, so he has no choice but to look and give his opinion on them.

He hates them all. His mother ends up buying a 3 pack of size small sports bras and shoves him into his room with them. She tells him that he'll wear them, and that’s final. He resists for a few days, but then she wrestles him into one herself, and he doesn’t try to avoid it again. Better to torture himself than go through that ever again.

* * *

He goes by Sam for most of his schooling. His teachers always call him Samantha, or Miss Stevens, if they’re particularly formal or fed up. The students call him Sam though, and he finds that he likes that a lot better than his full name.

No one calls him Sammy. He’s not entirely sure why. When he thinks about it, he thinks that maybe Sammy doesn’t sound feminine enough, and so they avoid it subconsciously. Because he’s a girl, according to the school and his parents and everyone he knows.

He doesn’t want to be a girl. He doesn’t want to be Samantha.

He wonders, wistfully, if anyone will ever call him Sammy. If he'll ever hear _Mr Stevens_ and have it directed at _him_ , rather than his father.

He hopes for a future where everything is easy and right, and stomps down on the doubts that threaten to crush this dream.

He will get that future. Even if he has to fight tooth and nail for it.

* * *

“I am a boy, I _am_ a boy, I _am a boy_.”

He chants it to himself, alone in his room, in the dark, long after his parents have gone to sleep, long after the sun has closed its eye to him. He whispers it in the quiet of the night, as if speaking any louder will shatter the fragile peace, will warp and break the declaration, expose its flaws to the light until he's crushed until the weight of his insecurities, his doubt.

Is he? Can he ever be? Or is he lying to himself, making a fuss, playing at being special when he’s nothing more than regular, another _girl_ who wants more than she can ever have?

He’s not. He knows he’s not. But that surety only comes here, in the dark, away from the prying eyes of all who look at him and see a _her_.

He’s not. He never was. He wishes he could prove it.

He wonders, sometimes, if it would help to take the things that assign him as _her_ and cast them away. Cut his hair, tear his skin, rummage through the soft tissue inside and pull out the parts that shouldn’t be there. Would that fix him, if he could live through it? Recollect his blood and sew himself back together, emptier of everything that’s wrong and so much fuller for it.

He is weak though, and flinches away from the cool metal that touches his skin, shakes under the heaviness of the action, never manages to cut deep enough to reach anything. All it does is ruin his flesh, and at least now it matches the war inside of him, the slices and gorges reflecting the turmoil in his psyche.

His mother screams at him when she sees the scars, the freshly bleeding cuts. She grabs him, rough with emotion and if he were charitable, he would label it as worry. But he knows that it’s only rage, that he would dare to ruin the perfect doll she is trying to create out of him. That he dares to defy her like this.

He runs away for the first time, after that confrontation. But he’s weak, and he’s a coward, and he crawls back before the day has even ended.

“I am a boy,” he whispers, curled under his blankets and shivering at the wrongness that crawls under his skin.

* * *

He tells his mother when he’s fourteen, and she cries.

“You’ll always be my little girl,” she says and he wants to scream. He wants to say “but I’m not,” and he wants to shake her until she sees, until she accepts that he was _never_ her little girl.

He doesn’t say anything, can’t, voice caught harshly in his throat, lost and broken in the face of her denial. He turns away instead, leaves her to her tears, and tries not to feel guilty for it.

He cuts his own hair a week later, sneaks scissors into the bathroom when his mother is away (drinking with her friends, he thinks, complaining about her daughter that doesn’t exist). His father isn’t home, never is, is serving in another country and hasn’t been back for years. Sam doesn’t know if the job is keeping him or if he knows about his son and would rather face armed soldiers than come home to this disappointment.

He pushes the thoughts away with every lock cut, every swath of hair sheared away to fall to the floor, heavy with meaning and heavier with relief. He feels dizzy by the end of it, lightheaded in the best way, euphoric and wild eyed as he stares at his reflection. The cut is sloppy, rough and choppy, and he is mesmerized. It’s a disaster but it’s _his_ and he can already see, for the first time, the promise of something _better_ in the way it changes his face.

He cleans up as best he can, and he hides in his room for the rest of the night, locks the door and ignores any attempts his mother gives to reach him. She’s drunk, now, and her pleading is all the sadder for it. More pitiful. She begs him to change his mind, to give up this foolish fantasy. “You’re such a pretty girl,” she babbles, and, “it’s just a phase, honey, you’ll grow out of this,” and, “why are you trying to hurt me like this?”

He stays silent, drowns her out with music and blankets pulled over his head and his own thoughts yelling back at her. She doesn’t understand, doesn’t want to, and all her words do is tear him down piece by piece until all that’s left is an empty shell.

He sneaks out of the house for school the next day, and ignores the whispers and the looks as he walks through the halls with his new haircut. He catches pieces of conversation, derisive comments like “what lawnmower attacked _her_?” and “does she think she’s special?” and “she looks like a _dyke_.”

He ignores them all, walls off his heart to their teenage savagery, closes his ears to their taunts, turns his eyes away from their sneers. He hangs onto whatever anger he can find and he toughens his skin against their assault.

They are nothing to him, and he will keep telling himself that every time he begins to forget. They are nothing, and he will not change himself for them.

* * *

He is fifteen and in high school and he’s somewhere new, a fresh start with different people than those he grew up with. He dresses in jeans and hoodies and his hair is short and his chest is wrapped until it hurts and everyone calls him Sam. He hears the name and it’s different than before, the way the letters are pronounced is heavier, tinged blue instead of pink and he lets it sooth the pain he carries with him always. He lets it buoy him, carry him over the waves of turmoil still raging within him, calmed by every overheard utterance of _he_ and _him_.

He is fifteen and he is happy.

But he is fifteen and he is only happy at school. He stays long after classes end, and he heads in early, but he still needs to sleep, to eat, and so he still spends time at home, reluctantly and spitefully exists in the same dwelling as his mother. She doesn’t nag or beg him anymore, but the loud comments about _her daughter_ and how beautiful she is strikes him deeper than any else and he wishes, in the way the desperate do, that if she can’t accept him as is, why can’t she just leave him alone? How is tormenting him like this any better for either of them?

He is silent in his own home, a ghost haunting the halls, and all it serves to do is push his mother into talking louder, more often, as if to drown out his presence until all that’s left are the shards she wants to see. He is there except that he isn’t, not really. He doesn’t exist in this house.

He never has.

Another year passes, and school continues to be his safe place. Some of his teachers catch onto the truth, and they adjust their language accordingly. Other do not, but it’s fine. Sam stays out of the spotlight, tries his best not to draw attention, and he avoids being called on enough that the few times he is, and the few times he’s misgendered, are easily forgotten by his peers.

There are some who taunt him, still, but there are others, now, who stand up for him and don’t allow that sort of bullying. Towards him, or anyone else like him. They are few and far between but he knows of them, is friends with some of them. It’s nice to be known, even if he wishes he wasn’t, wishes they only knew him as one thing and never the other, not even in the past.

Time passes like this for another couple years and then he is seventeen, four months from his birthday and three months from graduation, and he is struck, suddenly, by the fact that he is almost done with this. High school is over, and everyone is moving on, and everyone he knows and who knows him will be gone. Scattered, relocated. And he will be alone again, lost in a world that hates him for something he never had any control over.

And that’s only the one thing—if anyone was aware of the other, then he doesn’t know if his supporters would stay with him still, or if they too would turn against him. If they would see him, born female but rejecting it, standing outside the norm but still liking men; if they saw that and called him out, trying too hard to be special when he could have it so much easier if he just coasted along as a straight girl, rather than a gay transman. Why bother fighting against the current when he still goes along with it?

He can’t face those questions, those jabs against his resolution, so he says nothing. Nods along with the guys who think he’s cis, thinks he’s one of them (as he always wanted—and yet it still feels _wrong_ , in a much less discernable way than it was when it was only physical), nods and makes the appropriate comments when they point out girls to him, when they jostle him playfully (yet still too roughly), when they make gross and hurtful comments of their own.

“Boys will be boys,” he hears sometimes now, and it used to mean nothing, used to be about boys teasing girls, little kids and harmless fun. Now it excuses men who never grew up, who took the teasing and the roughness and only escalated it into something darker, harsher. He used to think this was what he wanted, what he wanted to fit into, and maybe it was, once upon a time when the meaning as still pure. Before it was tainted. Before it was twisted enough that he questioned everything he ever felt, fell into panic about things he can never control himself.

But this is a thought that follows him through his years and only grows slowly, something he barely notices some days. Right now, he is seventeen and still a kid, for another few months, and boys who are boys are still only prone to harmless fun.

* * *

The day after he turns eighteen, he goes to the doctor and tries to argue his way into getting Testosterone. It’s doesn’t work the first time, nor the second. But they do say the third time's the charm, and his third visit gets him another appointment with a different kind of doctor, and then he's _finally_ signed off to start HRT.

The first shot hurts, and it feels like triumph.

The hormones don’t take effect right away. He doesn’t wake up the day after his first shot in a new body, the right body. In fact, it takes _months_ before he notices any changes, and even then, they’re tiny. A few hairs growing where they didn’t before. A crack in his voice. A slight redistribution of fat. The ability to keep on the muscles he so painstakingly tries to maintain.

It’s slow, but it’s working, and Sammy grins fiercely at himself in the mirror, and he can see the man he could be— _will be_ —grinning back at him.

The months pass quickly, after that. He rides the joy he gets from his steady transition, and he goes through puberty a second time with a clumsy sort of grace. It’s not all fun, of course, but this time it’s _right_ , and he'll take every bad or uncomfortable thing that comes with it if he can finally feel right inside his skin.

* * *

He likes to think “I cut off my breasts” even though that’s not what happened. It was a professional surgery, leaving the outside skin intact and clean, reshaped to fit without the organ underneath. He’s always been small, thin and lanky, so they use the keyhole technique and leave the barest of marks. Unnoticeable scars, only there if you know where to look, know what to look for. After a few months, he looks like he never had any breasts to begin with. He looks like he never had to fight for every inch moving towards this stage of his development.

He looks like _him_ , and nothing in the world will suppress the euphoria that surges inside him.


End file.
